August 2001- CV checking

There has been plenty of hand-wringing in the past week about curricula vitae - or resumes, depending on which side of the Atlantic you work - and the ease with which they can be manipulated or falsified.

These self-created documents that list our working history and education can range from a brief description of achievements, work periods and dates to stylised texts delivered with the eloquence of the Gettysburg address. Some are distinguished by their brevity, with missing links or vague entries. It seems many of us take liberties with our CVs.

One in three job-seekers has told lies on their CV, according to a Mori poll of 1,000 UK employees published this week by cvvalidation.com, a CV vetting company. This is because many people believe, quite rightly, that career details are rarely checked and some cannot resist the temptation of adding a qualification here or improving a university degree there.

But is it a crime? Jeff Grout, European divisional director of Robert Half International, writes in his forthcoming book Kick Start Your Career that "while no recruiter would advocate lying on a CV, if you tried a job for three months, realised it was a mistake and quickly moved to something else, it might be simpler to leave it out. This is particularly true if the experience occurred some years ago and is irrelevant for your current job application."

Mr Grout believes that the one-in-three statistic is short of the mark if it includes exaggerations: "I think all of us to a certain extent lie by omission and create some statements that might be regarded as being economical with the truth." A few embellishments may be acceptable but where do you draw the line? And when does an omission become a cause for alarm and investigation?

The debate has reached sanctimonious levels in the US following revelations in The New York Times that headhunters who recommended "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap for top jobs in US industry, including his last post as the chairman of Sunbeam, had failed to turn up significant blemishes on his career record.

Mr Dunlap is defending a civil action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that he and other executives cooked the books at Sunbeam to inflate its share price. He has denied any wrongdoing. The New York Times report revealed that this was not the first time Mr Dunlap had been investigated in connection with allegations of accounting fraud.

But neither Korn/Ferry International, the headhunters that brought him to Sunbeam, nor Spencer Stuart, who placed him in his previous job at Scott Paper, had noticed that he had been fired on two occasions - in 1973 from Max Phillips & Son and later, in 1976, from Nitec Paper, a paper milling company at Niagara Falls. The Nitec case involved similar accusations of financial manipulation that never came to trial.

Why did the headhunters not spot the missing links? The answer, apparently, is that Mr Dunlap chose not to point them out, although his lawyer has said they were never actively concealed.

In a statement to Executive Recruiter News, an executive search industry newsletter, Korn/Ferry has stated that the decision to recruit Mr Dunlap at Sunbeam had been based "primarily on his documented accomplishments" during the previous decade. Spencer Stuart, nearer to the missing links since they conducted the earlier search, told ERN that Mr Dunlap had made no reference to holding either of the jobs from which he was fired in the mid-1970s.

James Kennedy, founder of ERN, has criticised the failure to trace Mr Dunlap's career. "Ground zero is the place where you start," he says. But Mr Kennedy should know, and almost every headhunter must know, that such thoroughness is rare. For most top executive appointments, as Spencer Stuart explained, prepared CVs are rarely consulted. A candidate's employment history is established during interviews. It is as if in the rarefied world of senior executive recruitment the CV is for minions, not for top people who have already proved themselves. Establishing the merit of such accomplishments tends to engage headhunters . As Peter Felix, president of the New York-based Association of Executive Recruiters, says: "Typically, with senior executive appointments the reference-checking concerns abilities and skills and competences and trying to get a handle on a candidate's suitability to do the job."

In the re-engineering-obsessed days of the 1980s and early 1990s when Mr Dunlap made his reputation, there seemed little doubt about his determination to get tough when he walked into a company. His reputation was based on ruthless job-cutting, not financial manipulation. Dealers who traded in stocks and shares loved what they saw and gave him the macho "Chainsaw" nickname just as they hailed "Neutron" Jack Welch for shedding 100,000 jobs within five years of his 1981 appointment at General Electric.

Mr Welch was able to transform his reputation into that of a builder but Mr Dunlap remained the un-repentant hacker. At Scott Paper he had laid off a third of the workforce within a year and earned himself almost Dollars 100m in salary and stock profits when he sold the company to Kimberly-Clark, its closest rival. The sale price of Dollars 6.8bn returned a 225 per cent profit on their investment to Scott Paper shareholders. These were the career statistics that mattered when Mr Dunlap became chairman of Sunbeam. On the day he joined the company, Sunbeam's stock rose 49 per cent.

So should the headhunters have been more diligent? The AESC has been sufficiently concerned to launch a review of search practices. Mr Felix believes it will be necessary for search firms to make clear to their clients that vetting is a specialist job. "Search firms are not set up as private investigators. I think we have to be clear about that. We need to define who expects whom to do what. It would be ridiculous if only the search firms took references, because the hiring company must hear some of these references from the horse's mouth."

It might make sense for the recruitment industry internationally to insist that their clients expect all job candidates, irrespective of status or position, to submit a personally prepared CV to recruiters when they are approached. Some US recruiters have been talking about "truth in hiring statements" but these seem to be nothing more than liability waivers designed to absolve headhunters from the sin of ignorance.

For senior appointments, the CV might even become a semi-legal document to be filed with regulators. That would need legislation but it might lead people to feel less tempted to be cavalier with their declarations.

In the meantime it would be good to have a single, internationally accepted name for the CV. Personally, I prefer curriculum vitae, meaning, literally, the course of one's life. It never does run smoothly.

Kick Start Your Career by Jeff Grout. To be published in the UK by John Wiley, January 2002. Pounds 9.99.

© 2001 Financial Times. All rights reserved

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